Granted, O’Neill’s widget is little more than a gag — it’s just a badge that users put in their profile to signal they’re literally counting the days until President Bush leaves office — so there’s a risk of making too big a deal out of one chart. But the more-than-60-percent drop in traffic that began on Sept. 11 (when O’Neill surmises a lot of users switched over to the redesign) is hard to ignore.

What happened? All the badges and widgets that previously lent color and personality to a user’s main profile have been shunted into a separate section called Boxes.